Iannis Xenakis - ST-X Ensemble - Kraanerg

Iannis Xenakis is the complete 20th-century composer--a pioneer of orchestral, electronic, tape, and computer music. His combined background as a musician, mathematician, and architect led to his conception of "Stochastic music," or composition based on the mathematics of probabilities. As impenetrable as this concept may appear on paper, the music itself packs a visceral and emotional punch that belies its arcane theoretical underpinnings. Now in his 70s, Xenakis is enjoying a golden age, as a new generation of admirers rises to the challenge of performing his demanding works. Leading this resurgence is Zacharie Bornstein's ST-X Ensemble, who here navigate the long-form electroacoustic work Kraanerg. Typically, Kraanerg is not about melody and harmony so much as the relationships between shifting constellations of pure sound. The presence of youthful sonic frontiersman Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky) on electronics fittingly brings the composer's far-reaching influence full circle.

This is a live recording of Kraanerg from New York City, 1996. Xenakis supervised the rehearsals, and was present at the performance. That should be enough to quell those who doubt the integrity of this version -- Paul Miller, handles the "quadraphonic ADAT" admirably! This is an electro-acoustic piece (75 minutes worth), but the electronics do not dominate. The ST-X Ensemble, formed by director Charles Bornstein specifically to perform the works of Xenakis in the U.S., places strings, woodwinds and trombones at the sonic forefront. Part of the electronic component includes tapes of a 1960s performance of the piece.

Xenakis called his compositional technique "stochastic music," and although I have not seen a clear exposition, apparently it involves the use of mathematics, algorithms, to produce patterns. You can easily imagine that you are hearing the product of a complex equation while listening to Kraanerg! Here is Xenakis describing his experiences as a communist/anti-fascist partisan in Greece during World War II from the liner notes, translating them into his musical theory:


"...the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets add their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust, and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context, are the same as those of the cicadas or the rain. They are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner. They are stochastic laws."


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